What do feudal
India, pre-Victorian England and modern-day Rwanda have in
common? They have all inspired the eclectic soundtrack work of
composer Dario Marianelli. From Terry Gilliam's dark fantasy
The Brothers Grimm to the contemporary Australian film
Opal Dream and the recent sci-fi movie V for
Vendetta,
Marianelli has scored cinematic stories from different times
and places, mixing influences from those settings into his
sonic tapestries. Such diversity should come as no surprise
from a musician who transitioned from Italian conservatories
to British soundstages to work on films of multinational
origins.

The aural adventures
of Marianelli mirror his personal ones. A native of Pisa,
Italy, he began playing piano and singing in a boys' choir
when he was six years old. He was a chorister for eight years
until his voice broke. Although piano is his one true
instrument, he later would play slide whistle and melody horn
and whistle on some of his scores.

“There is no music
college in Pisa, so I studied piano privately there, and I did
my exams as an external student in conservatories in nearby
cities — Florence, Lucca, Livorno,” explains Marianelli. “I
also had a private composition teacher, a very eccentric
American living in Florence, with whom I spent seven years
just doing counterpoint.” Armed with extensive musical
knowledge, the budding young composer then journeyed to
England and attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
for a post-graduate course in composition, followed by three
years at the National Film and Television School.

Marianelli began his
career doing unpaid fringe theater in London, which soon led
to paying gigs on concert pieces, ballets and theater
productions during the next few years. Then he landed a
feature film, scoring Paddy Breathnach's Ailsa in 1994.
Since that time, he has worked on a variety of shorts and
features, the latter including The Warrior, a film set
in feudal India; Blood Strangers, a British television
drama; Shooting Dogs, about the Rwandan genocide;
Sauf le Respect, a modern French movie; and the latest
screen interpretation of author Jane Austen's 18th-century
classic, Pride & Prejudice.

The first feature
film for which Marianelli wrote a substantial amount of music
was Pandaemonium, helmed by well-known music video
director Julien Temple in 2000. Having a director that
understood music made the experience quite memorable. “I liked
Pandaemonium a lot,” says Marianelli. “It was based on
the idea that early 19th-century English poets were the rock
stars of the time, the true revolutionaries.”

The score for
Temple's film was multi-layered, with several different
strands, all coming together in some cues. “One of them was
the fantastical and utopian idea that these poets had of the
‘Orient,’ the very place that provided Coleridge with much of
the opium and the inspiration for Kubla Khan,” notes
Marianelli. “There were also more romantic themes, not so much
associated to individual characters, but rather to the way I
see the beginnings of the Romantic movement in England.”
Temple suggested using some of the “more revolutionary” and
death-defyingly fast-paced music by Jean-Baptiste Rameau, a
French composer of operas and chamber music, as action pieces
for the film.

Such an adventurous
artistic spirit also propelled Marianelli's work with director
Joe Wright on Pride & Prejudice. They initially
discussed the time period in which Austen wrote the first
draft of her famous novel (in 1797), when 27-year-old Ludwig
Van Beethoven was simultaneously composing his groundbreaking
music. Marianelli played Wright some of Beethoven's early
piano sonatas as a starting point. He recollects: “I went away
and wrote what became Lizzie Bennet's theme, the piece that
opens the film, and we hear it played very badly by her at
some point and much better by Darcy's sister later on in the
film.”

Although the
London-based composer says he is completely immersed in the
process of recording and mixing the soundtracks he works on,
he reveals that until recently, he did “absolutely
everything”: writing, orchestrating, preparing score and
parts, recording and sampling sounds, preparing click tracks
and occasionally playing the piano part during the recording
sessions with the orchestra, not to mention conducting his own
music. Then he would sit through the mix, go to the dubbing
theater to personally deliver the score and confirm that it
was properly synchronized with the picture. “Recently, I have
started working with some trusted collaborators,” Marianelli
discloses, “but I am still there all the way.”

The composer has a
modest home setup: an Apple G5 with Digital Performer,
GigaStudio, a MachFive and two K2000R samplers, E-mu Audity
and Virtuoso synths, a Yamaha VL70 and P80, a Mackie 24:8:2
analog desk, MOTU 828 FireWire interface and a TC Electronic
M2000 processor. “I occasionally write at the piano, at home,
scribble on a notepad and then go to my studio,” he says. “It
doesn't happen often these days, as my kids jump on me as soon
as I sit at the piano and want to play along.” Luckily, his
private studio is a 15-minute cycling trip away in North
London. “I rent a room where I go every morning to work,”
Marianelli explains. “Individual instruments and vocals I
record there, and mock everything else with samplers until I
replace the sampled stuff with the real thing in a big
studio.”

A large orchestral
score like The Brothers Grimm certainly required a big
studio. Marianelli grew up with the symphonic music of the
story's early 18th-century setting, as well as the
20th-century orchestral music that provided a strong influence
for the soundtrack. There are two pieces within the score that
classical music aficionados will easily recognize: Brahms'
“Lullaby” and Rossini's “The Thieving Magpie,” which is quoted
in the end credits theme.

The
Brothers Grimmwas a tour
de force for Marianelli in terms of both technique and
writing. “The film was really tricky, tone-wise,” he says. “It
really jumps fast from one mood to another and then another,
and to keep any sustained musical idea going was really hard.
But the blessing on that film was Terry's [Gilliam] unfailing
support and trust, which gave me a lot of scope to experiment
and try new things; new for me, anyway.”

On the flip side of
the bombastic Brothers Grimm is the modest British
period piece I Capture the Castle, which is about an
eccentric family of paupers living in an old castle who become
socially and romantically entangled with an aristocratic brood
in their area. Set in the 1930s, it's a character-driven
vehicle that features a multifaceted score — sometimes elegant
and romantic, other times playful and occasionally haunting,
particularly the echoing keyboard pieces that recall the work
of Brian Eno.

“The reverberant
piano was usually associated to childhood memories, looking
back and seeing something tender from afar,” says Marianelli.
“It is interesting that you bring up Brian Eno. I think my
music has very little to do with his, but on I Capture the
Castle, there was a vague connection to some of Erik
Satie's music.”

No matter what is he
working on, whether on a large or small scale, Marianelli
brings his cross-cultural sensibilities into play, which is
something that stems from his days as a student. He began
working with musicians from non-Western traditions while
attending film school. His first experience was collaborating
with Indian director Preeya Lal.

“[She asked] if I
could find a way to score her documentary about her own mixed
feelings of ‘belonging’: being Indian but having grown up in
the West,” he recalls. “I started looking for Indian musicians
in London, and I met a wonderful sitar player who became a
source of great inspiration for several projects after that. I
had also scored an Indian short film, The Sheep Thief,
by the same director [Asif Kapadia] as The
Warrior.”

At various points
during his career, Marianelli has scored documentaries about
archeology or ancient civilizations that have allowed him to
partner with musicians from the Middle East and Asia. He has
also worked with Western musicians who play non-Western
instruments, and while he says that is quite a different
experience, it has been equally rewarding for him. “With some
of these people, I have established a close working
relationship over the years and discovered that there is a
very powerful, deep buried point that we have in common when
it comes to try to move people with music,” Marianelli
muses.

Within his diverse
body of work, Marianelli has tapped into that power point very
well. He has traveled to far-off musical lands and
effortlessly whisked away his listeners with him. And there
are still new vistas on the horizon.

Biography
written by Bryan Reesman. Courtesy of Mix
magazine. Published on Jun 1, 2006 12:00
PM